Movie review and director interview: Amreeka

by Lena Dirbashi

Movies about immigration tend to focus on the dark and stressful plight of uprooted citizens. The beauty of Amreeka is that first-time filmmaker Cherien Dabis creates a piece of artwork that is anything but dark. While conveying some bumps through the journey, Dabis lets the audience see that the journey is a success, giving us a bittersweet look at the struggle of Palestinians coming to Amreeka, the informal Arabic word for the United States of America.

Amreeka narrates the story of a Palestinian mother and son from the city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. Writer/director Dabis uses typical images of the Israeli occupation: Main character Muna passes by a graffiti-splashed separation wall while enduring humiliating harassment by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints.

The idea of leaving their homeland wouldn’t ever occur to her despite the hardship of living under the occupation – until Muna receives a letter of VISA-entry acceptance to the United States. One decisive scene shows Muna and her son Fadi struggling to reach a decision because she doesn't want to leave her homeland when Fadi counters: “It's better than being prisoners in our own country.”

Coupled with family problems and an insensitive ex-husband, Muna agrees to leave and packs their bags to embark on a new life in the United States, an opportunity, Fadi reminds her, “People would kill for.”

But U.S. customs questions their identity. “Citizenship?” a customs official asks. Muna admits she doesn't have citizenship. “We are from the Palestinian territories,” she says. The passport gets stamped anyhow, since the official didn’t have a clue where or what Palestinian territories are – mirroring the stateless status some Palestinians feel living in the United States.

Muna arrives at the Chicago airport and is greeted by her sister, Raghda, who lives a suburban life with her husband, a doctor, and three daughters. The majority of the film follows Muna and Fadi as they integrate into their new home, and also explores Raghda's “new American” family and their diaspora existence.

Raghda and her husband live as Arabs in America, but on differing spectrums. Raghda is socially and culturally connected to her homeland and wishes to return. Her husband, Nabeel, is more connected politically and is often glued to news updates about the 2003 Iraq invasion. As is common with the rhetorical criticism of the war, he ridicules news commentary on the war coverage with sarcastic comments like, "they accidentally bombed the house."

The war also brings personal problems to the family, as Nabeel’s patients leave his practice because of his Arab identity and perhaps their lingering hostility from 9/11 – the bridge of the Iraq War and Al-Qaeda in the eyes of many Americans. But he insists that staying in the U.S is better in order to preserve their “American dream.” The striking conflict of how far they should assimilate is brought up in a heated argument between Raghda and Nabeel, in which Raghda ridicules her husband for suggesting they put an American flag in front of their house to ward off threats. When she realizes that her husband still thinks it's a good idea, she calls him a coward and walks out on him.

Their children are hybrid Arab-Americans, and they face the paradoxes and debates that are so familiar to second-generation immigrant children. While at school, Salma, their oldest daughter, questions the American occupation of Iraq to her patriotic classmates. But when she comes home late one night, she gets scolded by her mother for “living like Americans” -- a line that is often invoked by immigrant parents against their more assimilated, teenaged offspring. Dabis, at a post-screening Q-and-A at the Angelika Theater in Dallas, puts it almost perfectly: It's the issue of “defending America to your Arab family and defending Arabs to Americans.” Herself having grown up as a Palestinian-American during the first Gulf War, she explained to the audience that making this film was almost like re-living her own childhood as "history repeated itself."

Dabis successfully strays from being polemical when she talks about religious and racial issues. The Palestinians in this movie are Christian, like her, and are often associated with Islam and terrorism automatically, from both the antagonists and the friendly coworkers. But Dabis doesn’t drag on or emphasize this point. One quote from Muna while she is talking to her son’s principal puts it well: “We are a minority there and a minority here.”

There are several points in the film that, if anything, makes Dabis' tone come across as wishful thinking -- and way too quick. The film tries to cover too much in a little more than 90 minutes, leaving powerful but subtle messages in the film that are too brief and easily missed. Had Dabis focused more on some of the underlying social or political issues, Amreeka could have been more than a cliché immigrant movie. It could have risen to a more powerful, inspiring, and educational film.

It seemed from her presentation at the screening in the Angelika theater that Dabis hoped to create a light-hearted, comical portrayal of Arab-Americans overcoming struggle in a post-9/11 suburban neighborhood. And if that was her plan, she did it well. "Politics," she says, "makes people too angry."